THREE TIPS TO PIVOT TO AN AGILE INTERNAL AUDIT ENVIRONMENT

2020 is an enormously monumental year for remote work. Right now, people, processes, and systems are either working from home—or aren’t working at all. And, signs point toward this new normal of remote work sticking around for a while.

Here are three quick opportunities to pivot your internal audit environment to be remote-ready.

1. Add Control Owners

When your whole team is remote, you can’t just walk over to a coworker and escalate a pending control execution. We’re all juggling responsibilities as parents, caretakers, teachers—and we’re not always 100% available when needed. So, it might not make sense to have only one individual own a control execution.

Consider supplementing assigned control owners by adding others who can perform the control. Yes, they must have all the right boxes checked—the authority within the organization, the appropriate segregation and knowledge of the subject area—but broadening ownership extinguishes the dependency risk inherent to a single control owner and makes the team more agile.

2. Use Video Conferencing to Your Advantage

Your kids are on Zoom calls. Late-night talk show hosts are on Zoom calls. Chances are, video conferencing will come in handy for you, too.

Before, you were likely using memos or meeting minutes to evidence the execution of entity-level and governance controls performed by committee. Today, these tactics are somewhere between “unlikely” and “impossible.”

Leverage the current new normal of video conferencing, and record these committee meetings that can serve as entity-level and governance controls as they are performed. These recordings can then also serve as the evidence needed for internal audit purposes.

Of course, there are some ground rules your company needs to lay out—who makes the recordings, who can access them, that sort of thing—but handled correctly, video conferencing can be a handy, agile supplement to testing

3. Accelerate Your Digitization

Question 1, 2020 may have been the first time your company closed the books virtually. From leaders I’ve spoken to, companies that transitioned smoothly through this new scenario attributed the success primarily to digitized, cloud-enabled close processes.

While digitization can be a long-haul process involving system and process migrations, it’s completely necessary to make your controls remote-ready. The best time to do it? Now.

Journal entry reviews are a glaring example of how digitization is improving work. For instance, if you perform and evidence reviews on a hard copy, a wet signature approach can be challenging when you’re remote.

With the right technology, journal entry reviews can be handled via digital signature—the reviewer can append their digital signature on the soft copy journal entry prior to posting to the general ledger. Then, you get the audit trail— name, date, and time—for the internal audit reviews downstream.

Source - Internal Audit 360